Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  ‘So,’ I say, sitting down beside her, ‘we’re in with the gentry. All our vaguely leftish prejudices down the drain. Instant corruption.’

  ‘We could say Tilda was ill.’

  ‘You don’t want to go?’

  ‘Do you?’

  Do I? Yes! Why not? Social adventure. Human contact. Life.

  ‘We shan’t enjoy it,’ says Kate.

  ‘Of course not. It’ll be terrible.’

  She says nothing, which is a sign of disagreement. That is, she agrees it’ll be terrible, but she knows I mean it’ll be wonderfully terrible, a source of amusement, and this is not how she sees life at all. Also, she knows that my mind’s made up. For once. And that although it sometimes unmakes itself of its own accord, it’s unlikely to be discomposed by external pressure.

  ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘He was charming. He raised his cap to you.’

  ‘I don’t understand why he’s asking us.’

  ‘He said – he wants our advice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to give it.’

  Because what sort of advice does he want from us? Not, I imagine, our moral advice. Nor our advice about agriculture or animal husbandry. Is some small but vexing question of etiquette or precedence bothering him? Should the Lord Lieutenant take the divorced wife of the Queen’s second cousin into dinner? Do I think it would be all right for him to wear a cummerbund to the Hunt Ball?

  Or could it be my professional advice that he wants? My opinions as a philosopher on some epistemological question that’s come to haunt him? Can he ever truly know that his tenants have feelings? Is everything around him – his estate, his brown check jacket, his Land-Rover – really a dream?

  No, Kate and I both know what sort of advice he wants. It’s Kate’s professional opinion. He has a painting that’s always been rumoured in the family to be a Constable, a Tintoretto, a Rembrandt, etc. A vase, a jug, a china dog, a porcelain shepherdess, which he of course doesn’t suppose for a moment is of any interest or value, but which he’d be grateful if she’d just cast an eye over, if only to set his mind at rest, etc etc.

  ‘I’ll do all the talking,’ I assure her.

  Silence. She means I always do. I mean I’ll explain to him that she’s on holiday, she’s on maternity leave, she can’t be asked to identify things. And that even if she weren’t on holiday, even if there were no small baby in the forefront of her thoughts, even if she were sitting in her office at the Hamlish, being paid to think about art, she doesn’t think about art like that. She doesn’t identify things. She’s not that sort of art historian, whatever the woman in the newspaper shop or the man who fixes the septic tank may have told him.

  More silence. I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking that perhaps it’s my views on art he wants. Perhaps, she’s suggesting ironically, the Churt family have some painting which they’ve always believed to be by the Master of the Embroidered Foliage, an artist whose name opens up delicate ground between us. I shan’t rise to this. I shall remain as silent as she is. But it’s a little unkind of her to bring the subject up now, however wordlessly. I’ve given her no recent cause for recrimination. In fact I’ve just suddenly and surprisingly kissed her, which she loves my doing. But I shan’t say a word. I shan’t even not say a word. I shall simply nudge her fat shoulder and laugh her out of it.

  ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Just tell him it’s a Constable and maybe he’ll invite me to go shooting with him.’

  And as soon as I say it, and the silence sets in again, I realize that even joking about the possibility of my finding alternatives to writing my book while I’m down here is going to stir her suspicions. She was uneasy enough about my sudden pounce sideways out of philosophy into something more like art, or at any rate the philosophy of art, as if I were trespassing on her territory. She was uneasier still when I decided to take a year off to launch my new career by writing a book about the impact of nominalism on Netherlandish art of the fifteenth century; openly alarmed when, seven months into my sabbatical, I suddenly put the book aside to write an extended essay on one particular artist of the period who’d come to seem to me grossly underrated; and not relieved, but even more alarmed, when I decided, two months later, that the Master of the Embroidered Foliage, far from being underrated, had no virtues that I could now perceive; when I abandoned this extramarital fling as suddenly as I’d begun it and returned to the lawful embrace of nominalism, with now only five months left to finish the book before I’m due back in my department. Eight of my fourteen months of freedom have gone. She suspects that considerably less than eight-fourteenths of the book that is going to launch my new career have yet been written. She fears that, come September, I’ll turn out to have jumped off philosophy and fallen short of art. She thinks that I’ve lost my way in life. That while her reputation in comparative Christian iconography slowly and methodically grows from year to year, like the standard work of reference that she’s writing on the subject, I’ve embarrassingly fallen off the back of the cart. This is why we’ve come down to the country – to get away from any friends or acquaintances, libraries or galleries which might put some bright new idea into my head. We shall cook, look after Tilda and write. There’ll be nothing to tempt us out of the house, because there’ll be nothing to do out there except fall down in the mud, and no one to speak to but sheep and cows. And now, within hours of arriving, I’m humorously contemplating another sudden relaunch as country gentleman. No wonder she’s saying nothing.

  I nudge her shoulder again, reassuringly, and announce a change of subject. ‘The iconography of sports jackets. Why does Tony Churt’s brown check sports jacket make it clear that he’s a country landowner, while my grey pepper-and-salt sports jacket announces me as an urban intellectual? Why does the seediness of my jacket suggest high-mindedness and poverty, while the seediness of his indicates limited intelligence and wealth?’

  Kate says nothing. But says it much more companionably now. Her moment of panic and distrust is over.

  ‘In fact,’ I say, ‘the iconography of the entire estate is quite interesting. The battered Land-Rover – the broken gates – they’re all expressions of a certain style of ironic understatement. They all shout money. We could do a joint paper on the iconic significance of frayed pink baler twine.’

  ‘Does he have money?’ says Kate.

  ‘Of course he does.’

  We go on gazing into the fire together.

  ‘His name’s probably another irony. Tony Churt. He’s really Sir Tony. He’s Lord Churt.’

  ‘Is he, in fact?’

  ‘No idea. I’m going to go on thinking of him as Tony.’

  Tilda stirs, then settles again. We gaze at her instead of the fire. She’s lovely.

  ‘You’re getting as fat as me,’ says Kate, still looking at Tilda but I think meaning me, an ambiguity I find curiously touching.

  I say nothing. So I’m getting fat, like her and Tilda. All right. It suits me. I’ve a fat, phlegmatic, cheerful disposition. We all three of us do. I’m going to finish my book, whatever Kate thinks. Everything’s going to be all right. I know that. How do I know it? Well, how do I know that the sun’s warm and oranges are orange and Tilda’s lovely? There’s a simple but philosophically rather profound answer to all these questions:

  I just do.

  The ironic understatement of the Churts’ iconography at Upwood begins as soon as you reach the end of their drive. The first touch of it is in the announcement of the house’s identity to the world at large. It’s as modest as our own: no announcement. The Churts feel, presumably, that everyone they might conceivably wish to see already knows where their house is and what it’s called, and they’re too modest to boast about it to anyone else. The message for the rest of the world, which appears on a flaking board glimpsed in our headlights through the rain as we turn off the road, is simple: Private Property. Keep Out.

  The style’s continued in the string of potholes and lakes on the drive, ov
er and through which our ill-prepared little car thumps and swims with considerable alarm. Kate puts a steadying hand on the precious box on the back seat. ‘Did you put our boots in?’ she asks.

  ‘We shan’t need them inside the house,’ I assure her. ‘Shall we?’

  The house itself, when we reach it, consists phenomeno-logically speaking of a single lamp in the darkness and what the light from it falls on – a front door vast enough to keep the Peasants’ Revolt at bay, with the barking of dogs on the other side of it, and the wetness of the rain on my head, reinforced by the spray from a spout of water falling from the gutters somewhere in the night overhead into another lake in the gravel underfoot.

  Then the door’s open, and we’re in the middle of a genial battle to squeeze past a lunging, tangled, slavering, amiable mass of dog. We’re simultaneously patting its snorting, sneezing, endlessly moving heads, holding our small human cargo out of its reach, and shaking hands with its roaring master. ‘Oh, what bloody fools you are!’ he shouts at either the dogs or us. ‘Come on, come on, don’t hang about out there, we’ll all freeze to death …! Don’t wipe your filthy noses on her …! Never mind these half-wits, just shove your way through …! That’s not your dinner they’re holding, you great apes!’

  I was a little apprehensive that Tony Churt – or Tony, as I would call him now I’ve met him if he were anybody else – or Mr Churt, since he’s at least fifteen years older than me, or Sir Tony, or Lord Churt – no, Tony Churt, why not? – that Tony Churt might have put on a suit for the occasion. Or a velvet smoking jacket, or even a black tie, because who knows what the conventions are here? But all he’s changed since we last met, so far as I can tell, unless some of the shades of brown are subtly different, is his boots, which have been replaced by brown carpet slippers, though possibly he’s nicked his face in slightly different places. I’m privately a little relieved, since I’ve defiantly come exactly as I was before, in my corduroys and Donegal tweed jacket. Actually, it was either that or pyjamas – I haven’t brought anything else to the country with me. Tony Churt – no, come on, Tony, Tony – is wearing a tie, it’s true – and in a festive shade of burnt ochre, now that I look more closely, which means he must have dressed up a little, because I’m pretty sure it was more like burnt sienna before – whereas my collar is as defiantly open as Shelley’s. Well, that’s me. Take it of leave it. I’m not going to change my ways for Tony, for Tony Churt, for Tony. Also, I’ve forgotten to bring either of my two ties down from London.

  They offer us the nursery for Tilda, but it’s a mile away, and long unoccupied, because Tony’s two sons are grown up and gone. So she takes up residence in the library, where Laura’s turned the heating on specially, or so Tony tells us, though I can see Kate feels hypothermia still threatens. Her box is installed on the great desk, watched over by ranks of silver-framed Churts and members of the house of Windsor, some of the latter modestly half-concealed behind autograph inscriptions. I sneak a quick look at the books on the shelves. There’s abundant leather-bound evidence of the voracious appetite possessed by earlier generations of Churts for genealogy and local curiosities. But by the time the leather bindings cease, literary intake seems to have declined first to travel diaries and sporting memoirs, then to a few paperback thrillers and spy stories, then in the last thirty or forty years, so far as I can see, to nothing at all. Our new friend’s obviously not a literary man.

  We plug in Tilda’s alarm and withdraw to a big room where small pools of light in the gloom show up little islands of heavy furniture and threadbare carpet. Kate and I perch at opposite ends of a long sofa, which I think a second-hand furniture salesman might describe as comfortably worn. In fact the upholstery seems to have been largely deconstructed by the dogs to tone in with the rest of the furnishings. The dogs settle themselves warmly over our feet, while their master pours us unidentified drinks out of a decanter. We sip them appreciatively. They taste … how do they taste? They taste worn. They taste brown.

  ‘Don’t ask me what it is,’ says Tony. ‘Some muck Laura got at the cash and carry on the ring road. I tell her to buy booze in Salisbury’s, then you know what you’re getting, you know they haven’t stuck the labels on a consignmentof battery acid. But she never takes a blind bit of notice. Frozen food? Same place. Know where I mean? Used to be a factory. Made slug repellent. Poor pet. Half a hundredweight of this, half a hundredweight of that, wholesale prices, breaks her back carting it all into the house. Well, what should we do without them?’

  I hope he means cash and carries. I suspect he means women. I avoid Kate’s eye.

  ‘God knows what’s holding her up.’ He looks at his watch. ‘She’s not doing dinner for twenty.’

  ‘Nothing we can do to …?’

  ‘No, no. She’ll have to get used to it. Did have a woman from the village who came in. Took umbrage, though. Also took twenty quid out of Laura’s bag. Twenty quid and umbrage. Bit much, don’t you think?’

  To take my mind off the disturbing picture of poor Laura, stumbling broken-backed about the kitchen, struggling with unfamiliar saws and cleavers to hack off chunks of complete frozen sheep for our dinner, I have a quiet look round the room, trying to guess what it is he wants Kate to give an opinion on. A vaguely ancestral-looking portrait hangs over the fireplace, discreetly blackened by the smoke of centuries. In the gloom around the outer edges of the room I can just make out prints of racehorses and hunting scenes, of the sort that brewers hang in the grill-rooms of suburban hotels, though reassuringly more mottled and fly spotted. A few modern still lifes and landscapes hang in an alcove. They were painted, I should guess – in the unlikely event of anyone wanting my expert opinion – by someone in the local Women’s Institute. It seems to me that the Churts may have very slightly overdone the irony of the iconography. I glance at Kate. She’s also sizing up the artwork. She glances at me, and quickly looks away. She evidently feels much the same. The Churts’tasteful avoidance of ostentation verges on the garish.

  A door opens in the gloom behind us. Tony looks up, and his humorous country gentleman’s character changes somewhat. His voice takes on a slightly sharper edge.

  ‘Problems?’ he inquires. The dogs and I jump politely to our respective feet. ‘What’s that thing round your hand?’

  ‘What does it look like?’ says Laura. ‘We’ll have to get Skelton back to fix that bloody stove.’

  She advances into the light around the fireplace, and I get rather a surprise. I’d been expecting, if not a broken old crone, then at least another comfortably worn accessory, like the sofa or Tony himself. But she’s entirely out of keeping with the iconography. Not much more than half his age, for a start – a lot younger than me, younger than Kate even. She’s thin and dark, and she’s dressed not in brown but in scarlet – a loose scarlet sweater that rises high around her neck and comes halfway down over dark velvet trousers. She smiles at us, but doesn’t offer her hand, possibly because it’s wrapped in kitchen paper. ‘How super,’ she says. ‘What a treat. So sweet of you to come.’ She makes her point: she’s not at all pleased to see us.

  She looks suspiciously at the glass that Tony hands her. ‘What’s this?’ she says. ‘Not that home-made muck that Skelton sold you?’

  ‘I thought it was the stuff you got from that foul place in Lavenage?’

  ‘What did it say on the label?’

  ‘Nothing. No label. That’s why I shoved it in the decanter.’

  I tuck my glass discreetly behind one of the perhaps priceless china ornaments. I hadn’t realised that Skelton bottled aperitifs as well as emptying septic tanks. I nod politely at Laura’s parcelled hand. ‘You haven’t …?’

  ‘Don’t worry about her,’ says Tony. ‘She’s always in thewars. If she’s not putting her hand on the hotplate she’s falling down the stairs. If she’s not falling down the stairs she’s falling down in the middle of the floor, either because there’s no carpet and there ought to be carpet or there is carpet and she’s got her toe
under the edge of it.’

  He watches her as he speaks. He’s a watchful man, it occurs to me. He was watching us earlier, I realize, to see how we were taking his buffoonery. He’s watching Laura now because he’s irritated by her, and he wants to see whether he’s managing to irritate her back.

  ‘Or through the middle of it,’ she says, giving us a little taut smile. He’s succeeding.

  ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Stoves, stairs, rugs, everything in the house – something wrong with all of them. All conspiring against her. Poor sweetheart.’

  And he’s anxious about her. Poor sweetheart her, certainly, but poor sweetheart him, too. He’s afraid she’s going to run off with someone. Me, perhaps, I think suddenly. I see the whole story unrolling in front of us. It’s only too plausible. Impotent ageing husband; discontented young wife. Now this comical egghead appears in the district. Someone strangely different. Grey tweed jacket instead of brown. And closer to her own age – someone she can talk to. ‘A philosopher?’ I imagine her breathing. I’ve never met a philosopher before …’

  Whereupon some great tragic saga commences. Which might at least save me from writing the book. And there’s something unsettling about her, I have to admit. The looseness of that scarlet sweater challenges the imagination, for a start.

  I glance at Kate, and make a tiny subliminal face that means I’m trying not to smile. She subliminally suppresses a smile back.

  Laura holds up a packet of cigarettes. ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Of course they mind,’ says Tony.

  And of course we do. ‘Of course not,’ I say.

  ‘If you didn’t drop so much ash on the carpets there wouldn’t be so many holes in them,’ says Tony.